The withdrawal of the novel

 

We are subjected to that which does not exist
       Simone Weil

When an old friend who has drunk deep from the puddle of the New Atheism complained on social media that religious people believe things that are “inventions, fairy stories, not real, made up", I was impressed by how a string of synonyms can expose the anxiety in the expression of conviction, and then intrigued by how it stood in relation to the same friend's fervid geekchat about superhero comics, science-fiction novels and horror movies that are no less invented, not real, made up. Is it basic cognitive dissonance, I wondered, or something else? Of course I realised that the latter does not arrange an ethics and metaphysics for its adherents to organise soul and society, and ‘belief’ maybe overstating the reader’s attachment to characters, their stories and fancy costumes, but it does provide a similar form of consolation in face of a cold and apparently meaningless universe, which must be why, despite the call for rationality and science to replace religion and superstition, fantasy is admitted and even celebrated. And while such exceptions are not obviously responsible for war, persecution, torture and murder, and probably not damnation or eternal joy in heaven either, they do rely on a determined identification with the not real. It is evident that the promise and authority of another world maintains a hold over even those who proclaim reason über alles. The world is not enough.

I have to include myself in this condition because, despite having grown up in an almost entirely secular environment, having never attended church and never having had any sense of or concern for, let alone belief, in transcendence, spirituality or the divine, I have dedicated many years to reading and writing about literature with an even greater intensity than my old friend. Except, over the last few years, probably since the New Atheism rose to such prominence, but also because of what I have read in that time, I have begun to question if this has been the purely humanist pursuit of knowledge, social engagement and self-advancement that I had assumed it was, and is perhaps instead “a passion striving beyond all objects”, which is how Jeff Fort describes how literary space inhabits a life (this being one example of what I have read in that time).

The problem is, I don’t know what this could mean. How does one begin to address this condition from an inevitably atheist starting point and having had no grounding in anything obviously religious? I have made tentative efforts to read books by Christian and Jewish theologians, and though impressed by the personal investment of the writers in the fundamental questions of the meaning of life, which was oddly moving after so much philosophy and literary criticism in which the writers appeared to be invested only in the rhetoric of the subject, rarely acknowledging let alone investigating its own presence in relation to its subject, as if asking fundamental questions might knock down a house of index cards, there was none of the inwardness that enabled me to engage with philosophy and literary criticism in a practical manner, in which, say, I would read a book about Kafka having read everything by Kafka and having felt that the experience mattered enough to investigate further. I could not relate to the terminology of theology let alone its transcendent subject. The words had only a rhetorical power, stimulating like possibility without content or movement. A proper engagement would require a relation to the ‘Kafka’ of its studies, which, I assumed, would require either years of study, a leap of faith, or, more handily, a revelation of some kind, which, even if it happened, I may not recognise as such because it would likely be understood in secular terms, such as a mental-health issue. It appeared significant then that one of the Jewish thinkers I read refers to Kafka’s writings as representing “the world of revelation … in which it is returned to its own nothingness”.

a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance.

It struck me reading this that the revelation might be an everyday condition, recognised until now as an “experience mattering enough to investigate further” without otherwise having anywhere to go except into the kind of intellectual research currently on offer: cultural, linguistic, historical, psychological, political, literary, each a part of the given world of the professional or the hobbyist, which only detracts from this vertigo of reading, this almost-experience at which an apparently humanist pursuit reaches a limit, the edge of its flat earth, which it is unable to accommodate let alone investigate, and yet which seems to be the reason for reading novels to such an extent rather than "living life to the full".

The quotation is from a letter sent to Walter Benjamin by Gershom Scholem. Neither were theologians with a capital T, and nor was Kafka of course, which suggests not only how little such designations mean when one touches on the most intangible of subjects, but also the value of bypassing boundaries when doing so. Willem Styfhals’ 2019 study No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy emboldens the suggestion, as the philosophers whose thought he discusses – Hans Jonas, Jacob Taubes, Hans Blumenberg, Odo Marquard, Eric Voegelin, as well as Scholem himself – are not the 20th century German philosophers I would expect from such a title (Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Adorno) and some may not be regarded by many as philosophers at all, at least in the academic arena. Nor would you expect the ancient Christian heresy of Gnosticism to have anything to do with post-war German philosophy, and yet here, to my great surprise, is a book that has helped me appreciate that my lack of inwardness with and difficulty in accommodating the edge of the flat earth has a history deeper than any regular philosophy book has ever suggested; how words like apocalypse, messianism, finitude and eternity, and the dynamic of transcendence and immanence, which I had thought meant very little to me, were those that give a charge of significance to dedicating an inordinate amount of time to reading and writing.

Gnosticism is a term applied retrospectively to ancient Christians and Jewish sects that believed God is entirely withdrawn from the world, which was created by a malevolent spirit and is thereby “an evil, fallen, godless, demonic, meaningless place”. The only hope was a dissolution of self in the mystical knowledge of God – gnosis being ancient Greek for knowledge – or in an apocalypse – the Greek apokalypsis means disclosure in an everyday sense, revelation in the theological – in which the true God will appear and everything revealed, which would also mean the end of time, hence the word’s off-putting modern definition. “All these thinkers shared the conviction,” Styfhals says “that modern thought was lacking spiritual investment in the world as it is” and so made use of the concept of Gnosticism to make sense of modernity in which the divine has withdrawn.

The curious title comes from Jacob Taubes’ note favouring the apocalyptic route to salvation: “Let it all come down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.” To which we may ask in all innocence, why would anyone in the modern liberal west wish for an apocalypse? Why is the world not enough to be going on with when words like evil and demonic have lost any depth of meaning and metaphysical threat? An answer may come upon learning that the note was sent to Carl Schmitt, a critic of modern liberalism, who was also a member of Hitler's NSDAP. Like others discussed in the book, Schmitt saw secular modern progress as secularised Christian eschatology (“the ultimate destiny of humanity”), except the modern world excluded the divine aspect, or conflated divine truth with the humanist values of the Enlightenment, making Christianity a dangerously fragile religion in that not only is God absent from the immanent world but so is the hope of a transcendent life to come, replaced by the pursuit of the material comforts of life and the injunction to "live life to the full", which leads to the obscure despair with which most of us are all too familiar, often soothed by reading novels. Eric Voegelin argued that such secularisation is essentially Gnosticism reborn, except that it replaced the mystery of a religious God with the impossible pursuit of heaven on earth. And while this might be OK for a time, we remain haunted by the threat of obscure despair erupting into something dark when the legitimacy of humanist values comes under question, and of course this generation of thinkers experienced more than one crisis of Enlightenment values in the twentieth century. They used the metaphor of Gnosticism to give such crises a form so it could be recognised for what it is in terms of deep history, given that the absence of the divine meant conceptual language lacked meaningful terms to discuss it. Schmitt believed the apocalyptic tendencies could be contained by the state and channelled into worldly salvation, and we only have to recall the messianic fervour surrounding Hitler to recognise how that worked out. Despite the hyperbolic edge of the comparison, this helped to justify my suspicion that my friend’s conviction in the truth of New Atheism is a mutant repetition of what it claimed to oppose, sublimating a need for apocalyptic truth in secular form, and may never recognise this precisely for reasons of faith.

I realise that the idea that the tensions within modernity have theological origins is nothing new – Michael Gillespie’s recent book, which ranges more widely across history and practice, is another book on the subject – but what surprised me was how the debates between Styfhals’ thinkers parallel those I have engaged with in literature for many years. For example, the central task of Styfhals’ philosophers was to determine the meaning of the world now that the divine has withdrawn aligns with that of Weber’s concept of the disenchantment of the world and the rise of literary modernism as a means of dealing with its causes and symptoms, notably in the loss of confidence in dominant literary forms, much of which is still marginalised by critics and readers as, at best, the integration of classical myth into the modern age (Joyce), a local transcendence (Proust) or, at worst, nihilistic and absurd (Bernhard, Beckett). This is echoed in Styfhals’ question of the attitude behind Taubes’ note:

Did [he] claim to be a modern atheistic materialist, a nihilist perhaps, who denied the world any spiritual value? Or was this actually a deeply religious statement from someone who rejected his attachment to this world in favor of another world to come?

His answer – “Paradoxically, both can be the case” – is immediately appreciated by someone immersed in what appears to emerge in the writing of those cited above, what Maurice Blanchot calls “not another world, but the other of all worlds”.

Styfhals moderates my haste in appropriating a correlation between Gnosticism and modern literature by quoting a passage by the Romanian scholar Ioan Couliano: “Once I believed that Gnosticism was a well-defined phenomenon belonging to the religious history of late antiquity.”

I was to learn soon, however, that I was naïf indeed. [...] Reformation was gnostic, Communism was gnostic, Nazism was gnostic, liberalism, existentialism and psychoanalysis were gnostic too, modern biology was gnostic, Blake, Yeats, Kafka, Rilke, Proust, Joyce, Musil, Hesse and Thomas Mann were Gnostic.

Gnosticism is then “a sick sign” because it can “accommodate with different contexts, in which it acquires different meanings”. However, I was encouraged to continue because Scholem believed gnosis is “a constantly self-repeating structure within religious thinking”, which could suggest literature marks the place where religious thinking recurs in a culture where it has otherwise withdrawn, in this case as anachronistic, and yet cannot be repressed. Again, it seemed significant that Hans Jonas told Couliano that an attraction to Gnosticism is “existentially rooted”, which may explain my dissent of current literary culture practised here in limited light over the years, even if all those words listed above mean very little to me. Perhaps I’m following Saul Bellow who described himself in later life as “backing up towards the monastery”.

If Gnosticism-as-structure marks the withdrawal of transcendence in modern thought, it doesn’t mean an end to transcendence as an idea pulling on us like the moon on tidal seas. For Styfhals’ thinkers, Gnosticism is a category of crisis because “the idea of transcendence questions by its very nature the legitimacy of immanent being and mere human life”. My suggestion is then that literature as we experience it, especially in what can be loosely and unhappily called creative writing, implicitly contains and presents to us the gravity of the idea of transcendence, and the expressions of the critic and booklover alike are drawn from its gravitational effects.

It is an idea embedded in our ambivalent relation to literary modernism: in public we feel the need to highlight and valorise its fight against the repression of “voices” (Woolf), its stylistic innovation (Joyce), its intellectual grandeur (Proust), its existential horror (Kafka), its humour and minimalist beauty (Bernhard, Beckett), and we strain to seek equivalent cultural weight in contemporary artists who thereby appear only as sad epigones because they lack the pressure placed on their predecessors by the felt absence of transcendence, revealing how the question posed by its withdrawal has been replaced by ones of current affairs, identity, fashion and genre appreciation, in which doubt and anxiety present as hasty comparison (“already being compared to Proust and Nabokov”) and as synonyms of appraisal. 

To apply this angle to Styfhals’ study: it appears that if Taubes and Schmitt are at the apocalyptic/modernist end of the gnostic spectrum, with its unappealing means of salvation, Hans Blumenberg is at the other, humanist/realist end, rejecting the inevitability of the repetition of theological structures, arguing that God’s withdrawal can enable human beings to recognise their finitude, assert themselves as free to explore their “worldly potential”, which we see reiterated in Martin Hägglund’s recent book with the subtitle “Why Mortality Make Us Free” (or Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom in the UK – the link goes to Dan Fraser’s excellent review). This has clear echoes of the conservative resistance to literary modernism in its promotion of literature as a utilitarian tool for knowledge and palliative escapism, and, as we have seen more clearly recently, for liberation and emancipation, initially for the bourgeois individual, then for the working classes, the subjects of colonialism and racism, and now for so many minority groups each individual might claim to be a group in themself and demand that the process all start over again. (This may explain the popularity of Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces theory in which everything is centred on the individual's “journey” and the generic mould it offers, leading to overtly nostalgic and anachronistic cultural products like the Harry Potter series.)

What this serves to emphasise is the remaining presence of a reverence for the aura surrounding literature, for the obscure power it wields beyond that of the utilitarian containment of its emancipatory gifts, without the aura ever being identified let alone examined. Gnostic dualism might then be useful as a concept to appreciate why we are so confused in our relation to literature in a world that doesn't quite know what to do with it; a confusion most notable in the aggressive appeal to the aura in the disguise of literature’s value as a vehicle of “worldly potential”, and yet whose repressed presence is the guarantor of its value.

Kafka’s novels take place in infinity…defined as the ideal point where two parallels meet 
              Erich Heller

The aura is the ideal point, but this needs the second parallel, which has disappeared. Instead, we follow the first line into an infinity with no ideal point in prospect. The other line is invisible, and yet, even in this lack of recognition, the governance maintaining its separation is how we might understand contemporary literary culture: the book review pages in newspapers, ostensibly there as evaluators of generic conformity and consumer guidance are in effect keeping readers focused on one of the parallel lines, which may also explain the division of literature into various genre silos: go here for Realism, go there for Fantasy; follow the line into meaningless infinity. You have only to sense the discomfort of those using the reviewing cliché “blurring the boundaries” to see how governance works to accommodate everything within its fiercely limited understanding. While this may seem a trivial observation, it’s worth looking at where the common gestures of literary appreciation have their origins. Reading novels in particular is such a familiar activity that we neglect to register how strange the presence of a book is; not as an object so much as what that object represents: an addition to the existing world which itself doesn’t seem to exist in the way everything else exists, almost to the point where it is nothing; “a gap in the universe” as Maurice Blanchot imagined the first time writing was experienced. (It may be significant that in God Interrupted, a companion to Styfhals' study, Benjamin Lazier writes: "Some kabbalists...thought that God manifested himself in the world as nothingness, albeit of a special kind.")

Realism as a literary genre is a good example of how the ideal is policed out of the culture. Why is the sense of a narrative being true to life so valued in public appreciation? Why do we need the sensuous or gritty details of the world returned to us in the form of writing? When it was suggested to Thomas Bernhard that his writing displayed “universal indifference” to the world because there is almost no empirical description, he answered that he was only interested in perfecting his art, as “getting to know the world happens anyway”. Perhaps the answer is that literature exposes us to that which withdraws from description, the place in which we are ourselves withdrawn, and we recognise this in the experience of reading a novel or, rather, as the experience of reading a novel, which we seek to mitigate with appeals to the getting to know the world or the guilty pleasures of an imagination run wild, when, really, neither have much to do with why we are drawn to novels. Realism and Fantasy thereby become indistinguishable, as all genres become one in resistance to the ideal. This may also explain the exulting iconoclasm of the art Thomas Bernhard was trying to perfect:

I’m no storyteller, I basically loathe stories. I am a story-destroyer, I am the epitome of a story-destroyer. In my work, whenever any sort of portent of a story appears, or I see any sort of suspicion of a story surfacing from behind a massif of prose, I shoot it down.

The massif of prose and what it reveals aligns with what I detected as an incipient gnosis in the excess of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, but my advocacy was bound to fail given the reception culture's obsession with gossip and genre. As I learned, this has been going on for some time.

In his great essay on Kafka, Erich Heller expresses astonishment at the “pathetic plight” of learned and well-meaning critics trying to accommodate The Castle within familiar genres – a fairy tale or religious allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress – when instead he says it is “a terminus of soul and mind, a non plus ultra of existence”, hence Kafka's inclusion in Couliano’s list. Heller goes on to define what he believes is the correct genre and in doing so offers a clue as to why the question of genre has become such a force in modern literature. He says The Castle is a symbolic novel, which he defines in opposition to the allegorical:

The symbol is what it represents; the allegory represents what, in itself, it is not. The terms of reference of an allegory are abstractions; a symbol refers to something specific and concrete. The statue of a blindfolded woman, holding a pair of scales, is an allegory of Justice; bread and wine are, for the Christian communicant, symbols of the Body and Blood of Christ. Thus an allegory must always be rationally translatable; whether a symbol is translatable or not depends on the fundamental agreement of society on the question of what kind of experience it regards as significant. The possibility of allegorizing will only vanish with the last man capable of thinking in abstractions, and of forming images of them; yet the validity of symbols depends not on rational operations, but on complex experiences in which thought and feeling merge in the act of spiritual comprehension. The sacramental symbols, for instance, would become incommunicable among a race of men who no longer regard the life, death, and resurrection of Christ as spiritually relevant facts. An allegory, being the imaginary representation of something abstract, is, as it were, doubly unreal; whereas the symbol, in being what it represents, possesses a double reality.

The issue for our response to The Castle is that, even if it is allegorical rather than symbolic, both meanings are lost to us because “there is no more any commonly accepted symbolic or transcendent order of things. What the modern mind perceives as order is established through the tidy relationship between things themselves. In one word: the only conceivable order is positivist-scientific”. This is why even literary modernism has withdrawn.

Time is the allegory of its own unintelligibility

This wonderfully confounding line from Pat Bigelow’s Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing follows from this and returns us to the epigram from Simone Weil’s notebooks quoted at the very beginning, which happens not to be referring to the non-existence of a deity: “Time, itself unreal, covers everything, ourselves included, with a veil of unreality. Such is our condition. We are subjected to that which does not exist.” While it would be natural for us to resist the ideas behind each statement, we can move closer to appreciating them by recalling that in reading a novel we are similarly subjected to “that which does not exist”. If time is an allegory, a genre, not real, it threatens to become doubly unreal to us in the same way as Heller describes despite it being an embedded and vital force in our lives. In reading novels, we experience a world without time, or, perhaps more accurately, the eternal recurrence of time, in which time thereby withdraws. So, while the meaning of genre is accommodated in public for its worldly potential, it correlates to the effect of liberal Christianity as described by Eric Voegelin: that, despite the modern removal of the divine from the world, there is a heretical desire for re-divinisation. This desire, a virus in the morgue of space, finds a host in the novel. The novel is the heresy of our positivist-scientific order; an unwitting gnosis. We might see the form renewed if authors, critics and reviewers set aside the 'about' novel to approach the significance of this other of all worlds, of that which does not exist, of what is otherwise unintelligible, to see what emerges in the withdrawal of the novel.

Favourite books 2020

Every time Dennis Cooper posts his favorite (sic) fiction and non-fiction of the year, it alone exceeds the number of books I'm able to read in a year let alone the number from which it was presumably narrowed down. This is why I suggested a couple of years ago such pages choose only "axe books", if only to give us a chance. Those below aren't necessarily axe books, but I'll limit myself to three works of fiction published this year, and three non-fiction, only one of which was published this year. The links go to my reviews, so called.

Novels, etc.
Lars Iyer – Nietzsche and the Burbs
Rob Doyle – Threshold
Sam Pink – The Ice Cream Man and other stories


Non-fiction
Lissa McCullough – The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil

"Most of the unorthodox or anti-orthodox elements in Weil’s religious thought stem from her unusual conception of the creation of the world as a withdrawal of God....This means that the act of creation, for Weil, is a radical act of self-transfiguration of God by God: creation is already the crucifixion or passion of God."

Willem Styfhals – No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy

"Kafka’s nihilistic experience, paradigmatic for modernity in general, was not the atheistic realization that there is nothing beyond this world; it was ultimately a religious experience of divine nothingness."

Joseph Kuzma – Maurice Blanchot and Psychoanalysis

"Blanchot proposes to read the Freudian unconscious as a radical exteriority, something that is not only indeterminate and unknowable, but that pulls man outside himself, outside everything he believes himself to be, outside everything that would comprise for him a center point.…an irreducible otherness that precedes any installation of identity – an obscurity more ancient than even the most primitive form of consciousness....an outside that is neither another world nor a hidden world."

The disappearance of criticism, part two

A friend mentioned to me that he felt alienated by the articulacy of a literary critical book he was reading; by its neutrality of tone, by its calm. Unruffled was another word he used. We all might recognise this feeling while assuming it is admiration, respect, perhaps even envy. We become convinced without noticing that command over what one has read defines the value of criticism, and that the object serves a purpose only the critic may determine.

His comments made me realise that I am often similarly alienated by book reviews: “We know everything,” they say, “nothing can surprise us.” The critic may be disturbed by the content, offended, made angry, impressed, amused, surprised or delighted, but these result only in the language of reproach or approval, in hachet jobs or raves, each accommodated under the alibi of industrial evaluation. Literature is again subordinated to its public uses, so that for the critic to experience a separation from that regular accommodation is to experience self-doubt and the suspicion of incompetence. Asking fundamental questions is not advisable.

Alienation is the residue of those unasked fundamental questions. Their repression is only one of many symptoms of the despair of contemporary culture in its dealing with literature; a despair that manifests in newspaper book pages desperately seeking an aura for what we must call post-literary novels. The fierce policing of despair is manifest in this newspaper's report of the stern rebuking of Barry Pierce for his appropriately tongue-in-cheek review of some generic ephemera.

For the critic to become ruffled, it would be necessary for them to become aware of that which makes it possible for a work to become a work of art, and for their criticism to be subject to that experience. When art is completely absent, or used as a keyword for elegance and good taste, the only thing left to say is said by Barry Pierce.

By “makes it possible”, I’m thinking not of the conditions of a literary work’s production, the biography of its author, or the poetic or experimental quality of the prose, but of what Maurice Blanchot’s writes paraphrasing Rilke’s lament for a dismembered Orpheus: “The work is Orpheus, but it is also the adverse power which tears it and divides Orpheus.” The work is that of mastery and of mastery’s undoing, which means, he adds, that the work belongs to an order that we do not associate with achievement. Articulacy would then risk betraying the work by ignoring, dismissing or, more likely, remaining completely unaware of the part that distinguishes art from other human creative activity; the part taken by fire, to adapt Blanchot’s title for a collection of his essays; that which is non-essential, useless, even destructive. Instead, articulacy emerges in firm judgments on technique and the utilitarian aspects of the work. As the 2020 Booker shortlist also reveals, this tendency also now dominates the production of novels.

While this domination is perhaps inevitable, as the work itself draws attention to such uses, the reason why art has such an aura, and why the review pages regard literature with such uncomprehending reverence even as they abuse it, is as much to do with its adverse power, the part taken by fire, as its demonstrable uses. Criticism might reappear as a means of approaching the clearing taken by fire even as it is appropriated by reportage or self-expression.

 
In the same essay (from The Space of Literature), Blanchot pursues the aspects of art that define its remove from what he calls “daytime clarity”. When we know nothing of the history of a work’s creation, he says, “the work comes closest to itself”. It’s a curious phrase, as we tend to think of works of art as moving towards us in order to give. Why should it go in that direction? And what is a work’s ‘itself’ anyway? A timely explanation comes in The Magnetic Fields, newly translated by Charlotte Mandell, obstensibly by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, but written in such a way as to distance the writer from masterful agency. As the publisher describes it:

They would write for a week on every day of the week and they would write fast, as fast as possible, in complete secrecy. When the week was over, the writing would be done. No touching up.

From a page chosen as fast as possible:

Vegetable gardens are surrounded by various fences and trees of May or October which let the wind wander through. What are the dingy houses that open their shutters only to broad daylight? The major chimneys and iron doors of monotonous buildings allow shouts and the whir of machines to run freely. You still have to turn your back.

The sentences are grammatically correct and the words make sense as words, but context withdraws as the sentences proceed. There no destination for meaning. While we know the conditions of the production of The Magnetic Fields and the biographies of the authors, we cannot use them to trace a route back to daytime clarity. The work comes closest to itself then by exposing to the reader to what Blanchot calls our “bilingualism in a single language” – everyday “raw” language and “essential” language, or language in itself. The closeness of a work to itself is the appearance of that essential language, an impersonal reality that is “far more or still less than any reality” with which we are familiar. The words become their appearance and begin to become “the elemental depth upon which this appearance is opened while at the same time it closes”. 

Mention of ‘elemental depths’ is enough to raise concerns about the direction this is going – those pesky fundamental questions, such as Jacob Taubes’ question about the sur in surrealism: “What meaning can this prefix have in the context of a purely profane, immanent, and materialist experience?”. This is the question of life itself I detected in volumes one and two of Knausgaard's My Struggle, whose mainstream reviews are the ideal example of criticism's alienating force. We can answer at least that it means literature’s utile correspondence to the immanent world is not enough for a satisfactory definition. 

Perhaps those of us patronised as booklovers appreciate this even as we misunderstand it. Industry influencers speak of another world opened up by a novel and celebrate the escapism it affords us, but we sense it is more than that and cannot condescend to our experience and deepest needs. Is it only an empty transcendence, local redemption, or a secularised excuse for an impossible salvation, publicly mitigated or misunderstood as gaining instrumental knowledge of the world, an empathy for others and, of course, escapism? It should be an open question.

There is much more to write about this, which I hope will emerge over the coming months.

Blanchot describes poetry as a temple from which the gods have departed. When the temple was in use, the poem named the sacred, only it was the sacred that was heard, not the poem. And yet, now that the sacred has departed and we have forgotten even that it has departed, the poem remains as the imposing obscurity of a stone ruin. The poem, the novel, the work of art, is the “abode of the gods’ absence”. In regarding the ruin as our own, the home of our own meaning, we have fallen into a narcissism that cannot recognise what Krzysztof Michalski calls revelations of eternity – "irremediable fissures or intervals … interrupting the continuity of lived time” but which are now unintelligible without the control of science and the coercion of politics. But each time we read, our meaning is exposed to the 'sur' in surrealism. Jacob Taubes answers his own question:

Poetry is the only beyond, not because it bridges 'this world' and the one 'beyond'. It is the beyond itself. The word does not bear testimony, rather it is itself transcendence.

This was clear to the San people of southern Africa whose ancient cave paintings “were not representations of spirits but the spirits themselves”. 

This is why we are alienated. 

More and less: Veilchenfeld by Gert Hofmann

Gert Hofmann's Veilchenfeld is the latest of his novels to be published in English translation, and the first translated by Eric Mace-Tessler. Tom Conaghan at Review31 has given it an appreciative review, recognising that Hofmann's presentation of a civilisation's descent into barbarity is all the more powerful for being without the usual framing political context, without psychological comment, and without judgment. This is enabled by the child narrator, who is more or less innocent or incapable of all three. 

 
This is enough and I won't write another review but something more general instead.

Despite the quality of the review, there is no reference to any other of Hofmann's novels, which only emphasises the shame of their relative obscurity. Veilchenfeld is the eighth to be translated into English, and the first since Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl in 2004, also published by CB Editions. I don't know how many novels are left untranslated, as his Wikipedia page lists only Works. What the page does reveal, however, is that Hofmann began his career writing radio plays, which explains how the novels' disarming lightness and compression was developed.

Two other of the translated novels are narrated by a child: Our Conquest from 1991 and Luck from 2002, the latter being translated by his son, the poet Michael Hofmann, with whom he had an awkward relationship, as described in his 1986 collection Acrimony, which contains a poem describing how his father's career changed course:

After the age of fifty, a sudden flowering, half a dozen
                                                                                    novels
in as many years – dialogue by other means: his main
                                                                                    characters
maniacs, compulsive, virtuoso talkers, talkers for dear life,
talkers in soliloquies, notebooks, tape-recordings, last
                                                                                    wills

I'd add that many characters and/or narrators are also incapacitated in some way, setting them apart: as well as children lacking the knowledge and experience of adults, there is Lichtenberg, the hunchbacked intellectual dwarf, and the uneducated flower-selling girl, the blind men in The Parable of the Blind (a novel written in the first-person plural), the grandfather in The Film Explainer who has lost his beloved role because of the talkies, and perhaps also the bickering couples in The Spectacle at the Tower and Before the Rainy Season whose relationship issues are exposed when they are unable to escape each other as they tour a foreign land. Incapacity constrains the narrative and animates the various distances between characters, between narrators and their experience, and between words and their meaning. The blurb on the The Film Explainer best describes the effect: "makes you laugh and then burns holes in your head".

One reason for the novels' relative obscurity is that they don't conform to English-speaking assumptions about what German fiction should be like, and so are politely ignored, which I complained about in the golden age of blogging, first in 2006 and again in 2007. At the time, I was also frustrated by my own inability to explain why his novels are so atypically enjoyable. Tom Conaghan's review touches on the reason but, perhaps because he hasn't read the other novels (again, forgiveably so), focuses instead on the embedded moral lessons, whereas what stands out for me in his other novels is the experience of ambiguity; everything takes place in an indivisible, alarming now. Perhaps the simplest way to describe this is to present the opening sentence of Our Conquest, translated by Christopher Middleton, which is set during the collapse of the Third Reich:

One day our little town came to be conquered, or, as mother says, rolled up, from north to south, cut off from all surrounding towns and villages.

The fairy tale lightness of "one day our little town" and that curiously nonchalant phrase for what you’d assume is a threatening event, contains the whole, more or less. We ask, what does rolled up mean exactly? It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? As readers, we're immediately thrown into the wonder of the child narrator’s world, which is also its potential for horror. In the first of several set pieces, mother sends her boy and his friend on a mission to the town’s slaughterhouse to find some butterschmalz, which sounds like a rich treat for people on the brink of starvation but, we ask again, if it’s found in the slaughterhouse, can it be so pleasant? And won't that be a dangerous place to visit, especially as it may stand for the condition of the wider world at that time and place in history? Little mysteries like these pile up and, in any regular novel, we would expect explanations to be part of the story, only for them to end up constituting the novel.

If I were to write a normal review, I'd say Veilchenfeld, while it is full of the Hofmann's dark humour, suffers from the absence of what sets the other two child-narrated novels apart, and this is because everything is also contained in the opening sentence, more or less: "Our philosopher has died suddenly." This removes wonder and ambiguity and replaces it with the relentless pursuit of a foregone conclusion. Perhaps this is inevitable given the subject matter, as Prof. Veilchenfeld, though it's not stated explicitly, is Jewish, and his fate given the setting is a foregone conclusion, more or less, and his pre-mortem persecution can only distress and depress; there is no now, only then. The narrator says Veilchenfeld's house is owned by Frau Belling who is in an institution and will never leave, which his father knows because he bumped into the institution's doctor in Klemm's pastry shop. Father says the doctor says:

she can no longer hold her water, but that would not be so bad, if she did not also trickle away in the head, and no longer know who she is or who others are and in what year we are all living. (When she is asked, she simply says it is too late.)

This is why, at least in the context of the seven others, the novel disappoints.

A rare sort of writer

Today is Gabriel Josipovici's 80th birthday. To mark the occasion, I'll link to various posts I've written over the years – after a brief interlude.

I read him first in July 1988 after borrowing The Lessons of Modernism from the second floor of Portsmouth Central Library because it had essays on Kafka and Saul Bellow. The link explains how significant that brutalist building was for me and how vital it is to keep such libraries open. After that, I borrowed the collection In the Fertile Land, which was in the fiction section on the ground floor, and was knocked out by the first story Death of the word, and then by Distances, the short novel that concludes the collection. 'Knocked out' is an appropriate cliché, not only because those were the words I would have used then but because, without being to articulate it at the time, they displaced my assumptions about what could be moving in fiction – not, as first assumed, ornate language, big ideas and big events, though they played their part in other books, but rhythm, repetition, pattern and reticence.

The final word there is discussed in his latest non-fiction book, Forgetting, which he says "once had great prestige in English culture but which...has now fallen into abeyance" because it is understood as a form of concealment, suggesting someone has something to hide, and that its opposite, expression (or 'brutal honesty' as it's often called now), is always a good thing. This may explain why his fiction has been neglected in a culture that values sensation and revelation so highly.

His most high-profile publication is What Ever Happened to Modernism?, which I wrote about at length. In an interview last month on the Unsound Methods podcast, he says he was unhappy to write polemically like this, but I would say such unhappiness only emphasises the problem with the wider culture that demanded such a response.

If you're unfamiliar with his work, I recommend reading Victoria Best's superb interview The Mind of the Modern. She says his novels "have such extraordinary elasticity" and "open up new spaces in [her] mind", which is exactly my experience, and this is important for anyone coming to his fiction for the first time to appreciate; forget keywords like 'modernism' and 'experimental' and just read. The novel Victoria is talking about in particular is Migrations, which deserves to be reissued and which I wrote about it five years ago following a revelatory chance re-reading.

A passage in an earlier interview develops a little more about this elasticity: 

I don’t know if what I write are novels, and names don’t seem to matter. I quicken at the apprehension of some human drama that is affected by time, and feel the need to find words for what would otherwise remain wordless. [...] This has something to do with time, with how human beings respond to time, with what time does to us, the losses it brings, and the sense of possibilities unrealized, but also the Proustian sense of sudden loops in time and the way our lives are sealed off to us but suddenly, in time, open up momentarily.

This sums up what I found so powerful when re-reading In a Hotel Garden a couple of years later. It's a challenge to write about this experience without reaching for familiar terms, which explains why I'm less content with other pieces about other novels such as:

• Everything Passes
  
  
• Infinity, and
  
  
• The Cemetery in Barnes

In recent months I have posted similar lists of blogposts I have written about Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, two other writers who have been important for me and this blog. Fortunately, the third marks a happier anniversary and reminds me of Josipovici's review of the third volume of Beckett's letters, which he says reveal "that rare sort of writer who grows younger as he ages". While it is fair to say that of Josipovici too, I want to say also that, as a reader, I grow younger reading his sort of books.

 

For more information about Josipovici's novels and critical books, visit the website dedicated to his work.

The end of literature, part three

On the evening of December 12th, 2019 a numbed grief descended over the land, and has lain there ever since. At that time a mild alternative to barbarism was being put to death. Back in 2015 when, against all odds, a lifelong socialist and campaigner against racism and imperialist wars became leader of the Labour Party, I made a prediction. His leadership would at first create a surge in support as people saw the values he stood for and the policies he offered, equivalent in magnitude, I said, to Thatcher's in 1979. But once corporate media had time to organise and focus, it would be destroyed. I cited Chris Mullins' 1982 novel A Very British Coup as a fictional precedent. This is exactly what happened. What I didn't predict was how such organisation and focus would itself rely on fiction. 

The numbed grief is also numbed horror at how such a mild alternative was presented as a terrible threat to all we know and love, and how those who took the fiction seriously were co-opted so that their anti-racist sentiments ended up favouring practising racists, their feminist sentiments were co-opted to silence reports of the mass murder of women (among others), and their pro-human rights sentiments were co-opted so that they came to admire the most brutal terrorist group imaginable and its assault on a society much like their own. The cynicism and cruelty with which these inversions were manufactured exposed more clearly than ever the demonic infestation at the heart of the political and media class. 

But this isn't a post about British politics. It begins as such because the same numbed feelings descended when I looked at the thirteen novels on this year's Booker Prize's longlist, and because it reveals a similar inversion of progress.

 

I studied the brightly coloured spines for the basic information, read descriptions of the contents of each and listened to the judges acclaim the list as "an excitingly diverse" selection full of "bold, fresh and accomplished" writing, without generating the slightest throb of interest. I wondered if, after all these years, my appetite for novels had gone. Even if I had long lost faith in book prizes to bring to light novels that deserve more attention, this was a singularly dispiriting selection, as it appears to offer not the slightest challenge to the form, only indulgence in familiarity dressed up in colourful clothing.

Perhaps these books need to be saved from their champions; what, after all, do those adjective mean when applied to writing? The first canto of Dante's Inferno is "bold" and "accomplished" and remains "fresh" after 700 years, but these words don't begin to say anything about the poem. They are words borrowed from a marketing department.

By contrast, many readers expressed excitement: Candice Carty-Williams says she's "sort of in love" with the longlist because it features "several black authors and debut female writers". She says it's "only a good thing" that one of the novelists, Brandon Taylor, said “I didn’t write this book for the white gaze”. Remember when John Carey said the modernists wrote works to exclude the masses and that was only a bad thing?

I went to the Booker Prize website to seek enlightenment about the novels in the hope that marketingspeak would be toned down and the books would be revealed in truer light. It reports that one novel is about "a world ravaged by climate change", another about "the hope and potential of one young girl and a fledgling nation", while others "[lay] bare the ruthlessness of poverty", contain "piercing social commentary", or are about “sexuality and race", "a life of violent crime", and "what it means to be a woman at war". There are even two about that subject matter nobody ever mentions, "love and loss". 

So here too diversity is the selling point, extended to subject matter. It is as if the judges sought to include everything and everyone – diversity par excellence – in order to suppress doubts about the conditions under which everything and everyone is revealed.  

What is happening when book prizes and the coverage of them has much less concern for the books in themselves than for the identity of the authors and their extra-literary agendas? 

Of course, this focus dominates mainstream literary reception. The symptoms are clear in Veronica Esposito's essay explaining why she's "falling out of love with Modernist Literature": while its books once "understood what it was like to be me", they do so no longer, and she's moved on to those that do.

In addition to discontent with older novels, there have been rumblings of the same with the contemporary novel and its place in the cultural landscape. First there's this anonymous waft of gas from a winged chair in a gentleman's club, and then there's Joseph Epstein's more fragrant equivalent, both coming from politically conservative standpoints, which the Booker longlist is implicitly keen to resist, and rightly so, yet the wish to emancipate different 'voices' above all else has lead to an apparently formally conservative selection of novels, correlating to the concern to protect progressive ideals for fear of enabling those that might honour them in practice and settling instead for the most vicious, illiberal of postwar governments, which might also be praised for the diversity of its ministers, but which of course makes not the slightest difference to their barbaric policies. 

The confidence of marketingspeak of the Booker Prize reveals only a profound lack of confidence in the novel as an artistic force, while history shows change is possible in art and politics only ever from a refusal to compromise; from always going in the opposite direction.

What then is the alternative to what I call "about novels", as defined in contrast to Beckett's description of Joyce's Work in Progress as "not about something" but "is that something itself"? 

How might we recognise a novel going in the opposite direction?

My reaction to novels is often more physical than it is intellectual, so to codify the genre would betray that feeling. But perhaps this feeling can be described, or described for me.  

In his short book addressing why he writes, Karl Ove Knausgaard quotes a passage from War and Peace in which after a dinner Prince Andrei asks Natasha, the woman he is courting, to sing. As she did so, he "felt tears choking him" because "something new and joyful stirred his soul". Why this unexpected emotion?

The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something great and illimitable within him, and that limited and material that he, and even she, was.

Knausgaard then adds his commentary:

The contradiction between the illimitable that dwells within us and our simultaneous limitation and earthboundness is the driving force behind all literature and all art, or so I believe, but not only that; the longing to equalize the difference, suspend the contradiction and simply exist in the world, undifferentiated from it, is also an important part of all religious practice. (Translated by Ingvild Burkey)

While the quoted passage is a narrated part of a novel and remains 'about' so that it is a condition only described to rather than experienced by the reader, its value lies in its description of the rare atmosphere experienced in some novels that cannot be attributed to what they're about; something for which a marketing department could not supply words. What's significant here is the revelation of what Andrei's 'love' for Natasha means and what it depends upon: the incarnation of an irreducible distance and, at the same time, its overwhelming presence. So instead of seeking a novel that is War and Peace for our time, or whatever, I propose we look for novels that become that revelation, so a reader becomes the Prince as he listens to Natasha singing at the clavichord. Knausgaard's book title suggests this is not necessarily something the author has any control over, which also suggests the focus on the writer rather than the work turns everything into a game of personality and mastery.

Knausgaard's example from Tolstoy is the less melodramatic version of Kafka's famous call for "the books that affect us like a disaster....". What would that kind of book look like?

Soon after the passage from War and Peace, Knausgaard says that, as a writer struggling with his writing, he was stuck between feelings induced by entertainments that carry no obligation yet provide an illusion of an engagement with meaning (watching Games of Thrones is his example), and feelings that "cannot be transmitted, cannot be sold" and are "yours alone until you die". This, he says, produces a work such as Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole, a long poem written after the death of the poet's eight-year-old son and never intended for publication but handed to its original editor in a small box 63 years after Mallarmé's own death.

It contains no sequence of events and hardly any address or communication, for grief is mute, turned toward darkness and emptiness, and so is the language of this poem. Reading it, there is no sense of drama, no burst of sorrow or sudden shock, the poem doesn’t convey emotions, it is the emotion itself, its rending apart of meaning, coherence, language.

For the reader there is perhaps nothing to gain from reading such a work except to feel distant, excluded, bewildered, frustrated, offended even. However, Knausgaard's connection of the Prince's reaction to religious practice may help us to appreciate why Kafka's call and Mallarmé's work depend on extreme experiences, as they address what escapes meaning in the absence of faith and the disenchantment of the world, out of which the novel grew. This may be how writing recovers something of what has been erased by modernity and the novel.

 
A book like A Tomb for Anatole could never appear on a Booker Prize list of course, first of all because its the wrong genre and because, like Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, another generically uncertain work written after the sudden death of the author's wife, its original language is French. But it is precisely this obsession with genre that is the problem. We need to remember that the novel emerged at the time when the authenticity of dominant genres came under question. There's Samuel Johnson's famous criticism of Milton using a pastoral elegy to express grief at the death of a friend: "Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief." The genre label acts like a filing cabinet in which the author can whip out the relevant file, write an entry according to the template within, and whip it back in again. Clunk. 

We have been in a filing-cabinet time for many years now, and perhaps it will carry on clunking for a long time to come. The "about novel" is that filing cabinet – full of bold, fresh and accomplished files. Instead, I long for those works which affect us like the song and its singing affected the Prince, for novels which struggle for generic definition and lay on the floor in diverse locations discarded by the office drones. This is how we may recognise a novel going in the opposite direction.

"And no real fate" – reading in the interval

A sportswriter on the radio said that the lack of football in covid lockdown has disrupted the rhythm of the lives of those who follow the sport. The word stuck in my mind. Does rhythm differ from routine? When a routine is broken, there is an interval of confusion and anxiety, and yet, when extended to this length, I realised when crossing a deserted main road, also peace.

It's like being at a standstill on a train somewhere in the countryside. Initially impatient to see the landscape moving sideways again, we begin to examine the fields, the hedgerows, the trees, the grazing sheep, cows and horses – perhaps spotting some hares, a bird of prey, or a church spire behind the trees – and sense another way of living in the rhythm of nature and foregone traditions. And then the train starts moving again.

In the interval of lockdown, I read whatever presented itself: a collection of Stifter's stories, books on Heidegger by Peter Trawny and Richard Polt, some novels: Gert Hofmann's Our Conquest, Dag Solstad's Shyness and Dignity, Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Peter Handke's A Moment of True Feeling and, for the first time since 1998, WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, each of which could be written about in relation to the interval, but then, breaking the run of northern Europeans, I read a collection of stories by Sam Pink, a writer from the American indie scene of which I have no knowledge and, had I read the blurb describing Pink as "a keen observer of the culture of minimum-wage jobs", I would have avoided.

The first story is simple enough, told by someone directing traffic around a minor accident, which soon becomes unnecessary.

I stood in the street for a second.

Not participating anymore, but still there.

And the traffic moved on its own again.

Glass on the street reflected colors from headlights and stoplights.

The road dark blue beneath.

If I had an ‘off’ switch, it’d be then that I’d use it.

No, I’d probably have already used it a thousand times.

The narrator then shares a meal with a homeless guy and walks off with a goodbye. At first it seemed like the usual stuff: a voice appearing out of nowhere for no apparent reason to give a brief account of the relation between a troubled inner life and outer world (which, incidentally, A Moment of True Feeling pursues at length), similar perhaps to the relation of being in a train carriage passing through a landscape. It is quietly moving and blessedly free of the precious and fussy use of language that has infected American short fiction, but nagged at me as short stories usually do because it doesn't answer the question I asked many years ago at the beginning of in an essay on Richard Ford's Bascombe trilogy: why is this person writing this?

The question remains unanswered in almost all contemporary short fiction, most of which is narrated in the first person without any explanation of why the person is writing or, if it is presented as stream-of-consciousness, why we suddenly have access to this mind. The next story The Dishwasher is told in the third person and describes how a restaurant worker maintains sanity with playfully ambiguous loathing directed at the customers and by bantering with his colleagues, but that doesn't discharge the issue. Fiction might collapse if the question's feather-like touch is felt. What set Sam Pink's stories apart for me enough to continue reading is that each narrative sentence not only straightforward but has its own paragraph, thereby loosening the density of descriptive prose by inserting pauses where narrative purpose might accrue. In the third story Yop, the narrator meets two youngsters sitting amidst dumpsters and cardboard boxes where his homeless friend usually sleeps. (I didn't know until reading this that a tallboy is not only a chest of drawers but also a large can of beer.)

‘Hey, I’m Samantha,’ said the girl. ‘Here, du.’
She reached into her backpack and gave me a tallboy.
She laughed like teh-ha.
I sat down on an overturned bucket and opened the tallboy.
The other kid said something to himself.
He was drawing on blank postal service stickers, talking to himself.
He talked like someone was pinching his cheeks in on either side.
We sat there drinking.

At first the style risks the impression of smug control disguised as simplicity, but as the format doesn't change across the collection, it takes on an unexpected character, with each sentence and little expressions like teh-ha part of a rhythmic rattle of a train over tracks. The story is propelled by rhythm rather than events. This is especially effective in Blue Victoria, perhaps the highlight of the collection. It is narrated by someone remembering a time when he shared a flat with Robby and Chris, and Victoria, the latter's girlfriend with a missing front tooth, who was often there to hang out when they weren't at work: eating and drinking, smoking joints, playing ball, generally messing around, such as with a block of stone they find in the abandoned yard next to the apartment.

The bashing stone.
I grabbed the bashing stone and handed it to Victoria.
She struggled, lifting the stone.
‘Juhhhhhhhhhhhrop the stuhhhhyoan,’ I yelled.
Robby raised the tongs and, without turning, replied, ‘Juhhhhhrop, nnnnntha, styoannnnnnnn.’
Victoria dropped the bashing stone on the spray paint bottle, which exploded rust-colored grease, voonk.
We laughed.
We busted the rest of the cans then split one of her cigarettes.
‘Oh I brought this for you,’ she said.
She lifted her sweatshirt, uncovering a fanny pack.
She unzipped the fanny pack and took out a book.
It was a book of poems she wanted me to read.
Rainer Maria Rilke.
We’d been talking about books a lot.
She was trying to go back to school and I was writing a book.
‘Cool, thank you,’ I said, looking at it. ‘First pie, and now this.’
She’d brought us pie from her bakery too.
‘Yeah, I figured you’d like it,’ she said, still looking at the book.
Victoria.
She laughed and looked down.
And for a moment I was convinced her front tooth was lost somewhere in the lot.
And that we could find it and put it back in her mouth if she wanted.
In the empty lot.
Scent of smoke in the air.
Sox game on the radio.
And no real fate.

Most of the details might be as random, trivial, and without apparent meaning as in the other stories, but the final three words appear five times across the story, suggesting a common significance. I was moved by my struggle to understand what they could mean; what no real fate could mean. Later in the story we come to understand and Rilke's name becomes less random, as it invokes the Nirgends ohne nicht – the nowhere without no – that I discussed in my last post before lockdown. So the switch from a German philosopher and northern European novelists to these stories may not have been as distinct as I thought.

The narrator looks back on life with Roddy, Chris and Victoria and recognises a time without reflection, which we might recognise as Heidegger's Dasein: a time of rhythm before life breaks, before the 'yop yop yop' of Samantha's burps as the beer repeats on her, before the train comes to a standstill, when the street becomes silent, before Victoria's real fate, and when, perhaps, I wondered, the question of the meaning of Being, otherwise so obscure and so readily obscured, arises.

For a change, and because of Blue Victoria in particular, I am able to give my trust to these stories even though they appear apparently out of nowhere, because the content is itself lost and alone, waiting for company. With each pause between each line – a paragraph break after all – each action described and each physical item noted becomes isolated, glowing in specificity and reserve, creating a unique rhythm, similar to what James Wood recognised in WG Sebald's real-world stories and uncaptioned photographs: that "facts are indecipherable and therefore tragic". Their unusually circumscribed context, potentially instantly forgettable, makes their presence all the more memorable. The rhythmic form is key and not so much the insights into a "culture of minimum-wage jobs". Searching for the means to hold on is a universal experience after all. There is something similar in reading these stories and perhaps to reading fiction in general to what Peter Handke explored in the poem I wrote about three years ago: the feeling of duration, "the most fleeting of all feelings" that is "not worth talking about / but worth holding onto through writing". That is, its significance and meaning is not so much in the time it describes, which passes so quickly and has no real fate, but in its repetition in the rhythms of writing; the eternal interval.

The last novel

"(We are, it seems to remind us, always saying goodbye to our children.)"

John Self's aside in his review of JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus captures the pervasive anxiety experienced while reading this novel better than even the most detailed plot summary, which is anyway likely to mislead the potential reader because it would highlight what, in the regular parts of his review, John calls the book's "unexplained developments, unrealistic dialogue and overcooked analogies". In fact, these features ease such anxiety as simply as any other workmanlike fiction might because judgments are set aside as one gets caught up in the drama, curious to see how it will resolve. And while this novel's drama does resolve with, as the title suggests, a definitive event, our anxiety doesn't fade, because of the title.

Coetzee may have enough control over the generic elements of novel writing for us either to overlook the unexplained, unrealistic and overcooked (or regard them as deformations of the medium) but we cannot overlook the title, which undoes all resolve.

Never has a title caused such consternation and speculation among professional reviewers. The setting of the story is convincing enough in its generic clarity but, for that very reason, everything appears out of nowhere, so everything can be read as random and hollow even as it builds a bustling world. Or, rather than appearing out of nowhere, everything appears out of literature, which for many is the same thing: this "bizarre allegorical trilogy" writes Alex Preston "never hits home, having no real-world corollary". If there is no real-world corollary, you might wonder if it's an allegory at all, or, if it is, you might wonder if it's an allegory of something other than the real world. But it's too late: "I’ve given up trying to force meaning into these novels", he declares, and is joined by Claire Lowdon, who writes "I will not be returning to these books to puzzle over them further", even if she does mention the obvious corollary, which anyway she suspects is a trick: "We try to map what we know of Jesus onto David’s story, but it doesn’t really fit. Nothing fits. There is no guide to life." It's fair enough not to puzzle on, as one could indeed spend an age speculating over the Biblical allusions and what Stuart Kelly calls the boy David's "pseudo-enigmatic utterances". Why not just enjoy the ride, as I did? After all, Lowdon admits that "the story as a whole slips along quite easily".


“I want to know why I am here”

Why not enjoy the ride? Because of the title. It is an undertow beneath the reader surfing back to shore; a tugging question that follows David's curiosity about how he came to be, which he tries to solve by asking his long-suffering guardian Simón: "How do you say aquì in other words?". He thinks an answer may arrive if another word for the Spanish for 'here' can be used. As readers, we too seek other words to understand what is going on here. James Womack is right when he says the reader sees a "story we recognise in the shadows of the story we are being told" but we can't quite make it out, and it is Womack who offers the reason why:

The trilogy is a work of speculative fiction, geared towards answering a particular question: what kind of Christ might grow from the Enlightenment?

The answer is given in the title of course: not grow at all. The world of the novel reflects a world with no place for an exception to the parched landscape of the setting in which science and reason have squeezed out speculative thought. Steven Poole gives the reason for David's alternative name:

“Jesus” is the label for a “wild creature” (as someone calls David) with a gentle contempt for the norms of civilisation; a disruptive force of ceaseless questioning that irrupts into ordinary domestic existence but not of it – as David insists.”

This too comes from literature, and not only from the New Testament. Coetzee has written elsewhere about Rilke's eighth Duino elegy in which the poet writes of 'das Offene', the open, a place outside the ordinary domestic existence in which animals live and children too until adults turn them towards conformity.

Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers
Antlitz allein; denn schon das frühe Kind
wenden wir um und zwingens, daß es rückwärts
Gestaltung sehe, nicht das Offne, das
im Tiergesicht so tief ist. Frei von Tod.

Which Coetzee transposes as: 

What is out there, we know it from the animal’s face alone; for even the young child we turn around and compel to look back, seeing form/formation, not the open, that in animal vision is so deep. Free from death.

For animals and children, the world is experienced as a "Nirgends ohne nicht", a nowhere without no. Death is unknown and the world is "a pure space into which flowers endlessly open". While the escapism of generic fiction may tease us with a return to this state for a time, 'no' is always provided by one's inner reviewer. Rilke says it is possible that a lover draws near to the condition for a time, while those nearing death no longer see death and stare ahead, merging life with death. In a letter, he explained in other words:

Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished from both. The true figure of life extends through both spheres, the blood of the mightiest circulation flows through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the "angels", are at home. [Translated by Greene and Norton]

If we cannot return to childhood innocence of death, it must become part of our life. And it doesn't take a critical genius to see that the family dog, Bolívar, with whom David has a special affinity, is the animal and David both the child and the one facing death. So merely asking "Why am I here?" is disruptive to the settled world of the novel, even if it is answered easily by rational discourse and science. One may then ask: why is rational discourse and science here? Given that Simón and Inés are not David's biological father and mother, no science can explain why he is here, and while theology may answer, there is no theology in this world. It's why the trilogy has a monochrome clarity and why David appears to be a contrived presence: both are exaggerations of the condition of the reader's world in which the enchantment comes from works of imaginative fiction yet whose features are as predictable and as empty as pre-Enlightenment religious rituals that, when disturbed, cause howls of rage from the faithful. Every portentous statement David makes that frustrates Simón is also what frustrates the gatekeepers of literary fiction: they promise a revelation while only increasing the disruption of the generic conditions that are specifically in place to prevent revelation of any kind.

The question posed across the trilogy may be: what revelation is possible in genre fiction? Alex Preston sees a lack of answers as part of Coetzee's "elaborate joke" at the expense of his readers while Claire Lowdon thinks he's seeking a guarantee of posterity among academics (Purgatory after an Inferno of reviews), and yet they never question the assumption that there must be a clear intention and conclusive message, even though this would compel us to turn backwards to see the form/formation of the adult world. Despite his scepticism, Simón succumbs to this assumption by searching for the final message that David is supposed to have left before he died. The message, however, is there in David's apparent naivete and curiosity; a message embodied in his outrageous, inexplicable presence in the world, entering with no past and no future. It's no coincidence that, when David dies, Bolívar goes missing.

Our anxiety then is as much to do with saying goodbye to our children as saying goodbye to the novel.


“Like Don Quixote, this is a fiction about fiction.”

What's strange about the seven reviews I've read (some are behind paywalls) is that there are only nine brief references to the single other book to be mentioned throughout the trilogy, with only John Self noticing it as the most blatant hint of The Death of Jesus' inheritance. David has peculiar reverence for Don Quixote, the only book he's ever read, from which he learned to read and which he treats "not as a made-up story but as a veritable history", including the belief that Don Quixote is a real person in the world. Simón wants him to read other books because "reading means learning about the world – the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be”. But David is not interested. It's strange that it is passed over so readily in the reviews because the differences between David and Simón embody the modern reader's internal relation to fiction, which emerges so powerfully in the anxiety of the negative reviews: Simón loves his adopted son and believes he is special, even if he can't make sense of his enigmatic utterances and despairs over his resistance to reason.

Don Quixote is generally considered to be the first novel and a satire on idealism. The famous example of the Don jousting with a giant when there is only a windmill before him is enough to sum up its relevance: when people refer to someone "tilting at windmills" it indicates that we know better, that someone is comically deluded. And yet this is a novel, so the windmill is as ideal as the giant, and any knowing superiority we feel over the Don is possible only if we have succumbed to the same condition. The enchantment of fiction is a disruptive force because it offers the possibility of the opening of a world other than the one in which we are settled, while allowing us to pat ourselves on the back for knowing better than to believe that it is real. And yet, here we are, enthusiastically devouring novels and earnestly discussing them, expecting and indeed demanding something more than brief escapism. Our enthusiasm is usually understood as nothing more than this branch of consumer culture, often mitigated with virtuous recommendations that by reading a certain novel we can learn about another country, a particular time in history, a minority identity, or a news story dominating the newspapers. Reviewing always takes the upper hand by co-opting this mitigation as criteria for judgment, and is fiercely protective of its ground.

[Coetzee's] late novels are a scholar’s dream, precisely because of their opacity, their exponential proliferation of meanings. You can go symbol-hunting; you can read him as allegory; you can read him as anti-allegory. Everything that can be argued can be counter-argued in another journal article, another critical study. It’s a guaranteed route to posterity: if your file can’t be closed, then you’ll never really die.

Claire Lowdon's disdain is pure projection of the anxiety that reading and reviewing cannot accommodate the deeper reason why we read and feel the need to discuss novels. Still, it would be fair enough if the evidence didn't suggest Coetzee is attempting to close the file not on himself so much as on 'the novel'.

Coetzee is a curious case in contemporary review culture because his novels have always attracted mainstream attention for their relevance to current affairs without quite convincing reviewers that he's a state-of-the-nation type author, able to weigh in where journalism floats by, yet without being able to stick a permanent label on his work. Many lament a falling away from the greatness they have bestowed in the past or claim they had doubts from the start, while Martin Amis says Coetzee had "no talent" in the first place (a statement about which Steven Poole is brilliantly cutting). For example, Stuart Kelly begins his review by saying he:

admired works such as Waiting For The Barbarians, Life & Times Of Michael K, and Disgrace. But here’s the rub: I admired them but I never really enjoyed them. There is a frostiness to his work, an almost deliberate opacity. They hint at being profound, but are they?

All three novels – to which Foe and Age of Iron may be added – can be counted as novels ostensibly about racism and colonialism, and Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa in particular, which you wouldn't necessarily expect to be heart-warming, especially if they were written from within those brutal conditions. But what comes after Disgrace suggests anyway that Kelly's rhetorical question is disingenuous. Alex Preston notes how the allusions have changed since the early work:

It’s striking that the most powerful moments in Coetzee’s great earlier books were strongly allegorical and carried deep religious undertones: the washing of the feet of the “little bird-woman” in Waiting for the Barbarians; Lurie’s prostration in Disgrace; Michael K's journey to deliver his mother’s ashes. These work because, while they are clearly symbolic acts, they also propel the narrative of novels grounded in real human emotion. Now it feels as if all of the pleasures left to the reader of a Coetzee novel are pleasures of the head, not of the heart.

While damning Coetzee's later work to his newspaper's dilettantish, middlebrow audience, these apparently heartfelt allusions to a pre-Enlightenment tradition are purely novelistic gestures, grounded in generic law; enough for a worthy if sentimental response to the injustices and conditions described, but no more than that. Such Lazarus-like resurrections of a buried tradition have disappeared since at least Elizabeth Costello not only because they are part of "the genre of the oppressor" (as Leo Robson calls it in his New Statesman overview of Coetzee's career) thereby appropriating for itself the suffering of the victims of imperialism, but also because of the genre's oppression of the world, of the nowhere without no. With his veld-dry wit, the Jesus novels are clearly very different from Don Quixote, but the teasing, allusive, ungrounded content confirms the inheritance of an immanent critique of the novel. This has a background with which Coetzee is familiar.


"As a whole, [the Jesus novels] make you wonder what novels are even for" (Tim Smith-Laing)

Walter Benjamin's great essay The Storyteller argues that the rise of the novel was the product of a decline in everyday storytelling, which always contained something useful for the listener, whether that was a moral or practical: "In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers." Storytelling was a form of wisdom "woven into the fabric of real life" gradually removed by "the secular productive forces of history", one of which was the printing press, and what distinguishes the novel from storytelling is its dependence on the book. The novel is written by an author isolated in his room. He cannot give or receive counsel as it is no longer living speech. Benjamin says if the word 'counsel' has an old-fashioned ring, it's because "the communicability of experience is decreasing". It communicates something else instead:

To write a novel is to take to the extreme that which is incommensurable in the representation of human existence. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. [Translated by Jephcott, Eiland and unnamed others]

Benjamin even cites "the first great book of the genre" as the prime example:

Don Quixote teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and contain not a scintilla of wisdom.

The reader of Coetzee's Jesus novels will recognise this perplexity, in themselves and the protagonists. What has replaced counsel in our time is information: "no event comes to us without already being shot through with explanations", something that these novels noticeably lack, while "half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation" because it allows the reader to absorb its counsel in their own way. In The Death of Jesus, David reads Don Quixote to an audience as if it was useful like this, but the audience, like a chattering of reviewers, only ask questions, needing information and explanation.

If this suggests an opposition between storytelling-fact and novel-fantasy, leading to the hope that 'creative non-fiction' may be the modern form of regaining counsel, we must remember this too remains a book. And, anyway, Benjamin confounds such expectations by linking the decline in the communicability of experience and the rise of the novel with the decline of the idea of eternity, taking us back to Rilke's Eighth Elegy:

All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience, as if on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds: this is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock in every individual experience – death – constitutes no impediment or barrier.

The ladder into the clouds is the sign that the story is timeless and can continue beyond its telling, whereas the novel is confined to earth and burial, which follows from its rise in the decline of faith in transcendence. The reader of the novel is confronted with the question of the meaning of life without it ever being addressed, hence "the perplexity of the living".

The novel is significant...not because it presents someone else's fate to us...but because this stranger's fate, by virtue of the flame which consumes it, yields to us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.

What warmth is there from David's death? None, apparently; only unease, anxiety. What makes Coetzee unusual is that, while he has appealed as a writer of the earth, his later novels stare ahead, and from our perspective they are unsatisfactory because they reveal the inadequacy of the genre as a means of climbing into the clouds, which would explain the perplexed reception of the post-Disgrace novels, albeit directed at the author rather than the genre.

"It has been rightly said that all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one – that they are, in other words, special cases" writes Benjamin in his essay on In Search of Lost Time. JM Coetzee's Jesus trilogy may neither be great literature nor establish a new genre, but perhaps it does put an end to one, and is special for this reason: The Death of Jesus may be the last novel.